by Greg & Francie

We are in China now!

Two days ago Francie and I got on a plane from Bangkok and flew to Jinghong (in the Yunnan province of China). In Jinghong we caught an 11 hour overnight bus (a ‘sleeper’) to Kunming and then at 6am we took a five hour bus ride to Dali, China.

Dali is beautiful and way up in the mountains. This is a nice little hipster town that reminds us a lot of Seattle. Right now Dali is cold and rainy.

We started taking Mandarin lessons yesterday. Our plan was to take 3 weeks of lessons here but we may spread the lessons out across several cities. We are armed with ‘Learn Chinese in your car’ CDs that we got put on the iPod in Thailand, an intro to Mandarin book, and an hour a day of instruction that we take with a couple from Switzerland. Francie is, of course, blowing everyone away!

UNFORTUNATELY, China blocks all WordPress blogs so we are trying to find some ways around this problem (like this website we are using right now).